Interrogations and the Supreme Court
Overview of Miranda, Dickerson, and Recent Cases
Although an involuntary confession has been inadmissible in Federal cases since the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court did not denounce physically coercive abuses in State cases until its decision in Brown v. Mississippi (1936). The Brown case established the basis for the Fourteenth Amendment “voluntariness” standard as the due process test for assessing the admissibility of confessions in State cases. Under this standard, the admissibility of a confession was evaluated on a case-by-case basis that would be governed by the “totality of the circumstances,” which included the facts of the case, the background of the accused, and the behavior of…
